Black Weddings: Marrying in The Time of Cholera

Last month, a peculiar wedding ceremony took place at a cemetery in Bnei Brak, a city in Israel, just east of Tel Aviv. With government regulation prohibiting large gatherings in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, the wedding was a small affair with only a few attendants huddled under a small black canopy, the chuppah . The groom was an orphan and while the identify of the bride was not disclosed, she was probably an orphan herself. The two had never met before, never known each other. These essential strangers were the unwilling participants of a ritual known as shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene (plague wedding), where the local Jewish community forcibly marries off two of the most marginal residents of the town in an effort to ward of diseases. Different communities react differently when faced with a crises, like a pandemic. Some seek medical help, others solicit comfort in superstition. In old times, people believed that calamities and epidemics were the result of curses put on communities as divine punishment for not conforming to God’s teachings, and somehow the blame invariably fell on women committing adultery and on homosexuals. During the 1863–1875 cholera pandemic that ravaged the world, a rabbi in Uman, in central Ukraine, declared that Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings were to blame for the epidemic. Following the denouncement, many self-styled public health guardians began to attack women ripping off their crinolines and beating them. One frightening story from the turn of the 20th century, tells about a town’s rabbi and his few rabid supporters who went on a killing spree, murdering alleged adulterers to stop the disease from spreading. In light of these extreme examples, black weddings were very benign and a charitable initiative. It was not like two physically- and mentally-sound individuals were dragged out of their homes and coerced into marriage with each other.